[racket-dev] okay to require rackunit in modules required at startup?

I think Eli is saying that it would create a "bad" dependency where
"badness" isn't something that is easy to say precisely what it is,
but the rough idea is that there is a hierarchy of modules (ie a
grouping of modules into levels of a tree) and dependencies should go
one direction. Making drracket require rackunit would cross this
hierarchy with a link in the wrong direction (I think).

In general, we're not careful enough with the way we've organized the
tree so things are a bit of a rat's nest. Part of the problem is that
we don't have good tools to help us clean things up, but the larger
problem is that we've just been growing for N years without spending
much time cleaning up this particular aspect of things.

Robby

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:18 PM, John Clements
<clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
>
> On Jun 28, 2011, at 10:52 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
>> An hour and a half ago, John Clements wrote:
>>> In certain places, I know that we're trying to be careful to
>>> minimize 'require's that occur as part of DrRacket startup.  Is
>>> 'rackunit' something we're trying to avoid? Specifically, I have old
>>> unit tests in collects/stepper/private/shared.rkt that I'd like to
>>> revive as rackunit tests.
>>
>> Adding this is a bad idea -- but size is not the problem -- the
>> redundant dependency is.
>
> The word "redundant" suggests that it's already required... either you meant something like "extraneous", or else I just plain misunderstood. Can you give me another sentence or two?
>
> John
>
>